What just happened to Confluence Cloud?

56 comments

I am a Confluence (Atlassian Tool set) Fan and evangelist... One of the things I liked about Atlassian Tools is they are NOT flashy and they don't mess with non-functional unnecessary "whatevers" .... AND it always works easily... Until now...

The new UI is something right out of the pages of Microsoft UI Development. (Remember the Windows 8 UI failure)... We previously used SharePoint for all our documentation and Project Management when it was logical and almost text-based (Version 2007) it wasn't all that pretty but pretty much ANYONE in our organization could find stuff and figure out how to use the tool... Then Microsoft went crazy and created all these LARGE icons and messed up all the features we used before the upgrade of 2010 & 2013... Then EVERYONE, including the executives, and young people alike dropped SharePoint like a rock... So we switched to a professional tool set - Atlassian... Everyone was able to figure it out in almost no time at all.

And now Atlassian appears to have adopted the same short-sighted UI improvement approach that all the kool kids use for their video games and shopping sites... I hate to mention it but Confluence is not a liesure time application or a shopping website... it is a tool to get stuff done quickly without having to take a 40 hour course to figure out how to do simple tasks...

Off soap-box.

Thanks for listening... Atlassian is a top notch tool suite (we use it for lots more than just software development)... please don't mess it up for us users...

NO looking around for it. NO clicking here and there. NO need to explain to new users how they get it. It just should be there. Because it is arguably Confluence's most useful identifyable UI feature.

Overview pages are secondary, and for those who actually have a use for 'overviews'. Only a very small number of those who use Confluence in our organisation actually do. I suspect this also is the case in most other instabces.

Is that so difficult to understand? People look for information about specific things. Or they want to add information about specific things. The number of those who want 'meta information' is minuscule in comparison.

I was a software developer for almost 30 years before I became a techwriter, and in those days long gone, we kind of paid attention to what people actually wanted--and to fixing bugs first!--before diving into changes imagined by people who think they know better than their user-base what's good for the latter, or what said users would actually like to see. All in the name of 'new experiences'. Which, frankly, is nonsense, but definitely the current Zeitgeist; with software producers of all kinds assuming that their clients consist mostly of 'experience' neophiliacs.

They don't. And your designers definitely do not know 'better' what clients want than said clients. So maybe next time you guys should do some serious market and real 'user' surveys before conjuring up more new 'experiences'.

I read your deeply thoughtful comments and was surprised how your experiences are similar to mine... However, after 30 years, I am still a developer.

I can remember when we were just starting computerization of tasks in the banking industry some 29 years ago and the users were Luddites and (correctly) feared the automation of their tasks... However at that time the usability research with the workers was extensive ~ ad nausium. It took six months of painstaking research before we were allowed to start coding. And the users were not happy because the change from paper to electronic processing was so drastic, it was a complete paradigm shift of epic proporations. The change took at least 10 - 15 years to become the new normal (with constant modification and refinement)... THAT was a business driven decision.

I think this shift in the UI is similar... Atlassian is moving towards the modern lowest cost user that will do everything on their Phone or PED at the lowest cost... The users will have to just trudge along because evey other tool out there is doing similar things... I would imagine that re-working the UI to include the tree view is a cost the company is unwilling to make because it might negatively affect someone's annual bonus or their political capital within the hierarchy of their organization. They will report to the "committee or team" that "some troublesome users made a fuss but they will adapt and profits will increase long term..."

I think Atlassian forgets that many of us hard core developers work on Intranets because the Internet/Cloud is not permiteed at work for security reasons. Therefore, we won't ever be able to use the advantages of mobil device development. Trust me - the Cloud and the web ain't secure and won't be for another 20 - 40 years... (We have two seperate enterprise-scale implentations two seperate Atalaissen tool suites.)

I doubt tthat Atlassian will have the courage to admit they messed this up - Netflix did when they messed up their core business with the online-only option decision... They reverted finally and regained most of the lost 20% of their customers. (That CEO should have been fired.)

Atlassian will not fix this until there is demonstratable loss of revenue. Which given the fact the customer base is stuck with HUGE investments in the content probably won't happen.

Confluence is going to become the "SharePoint like tool" that users dislike and are stuck with...) as we are in our organization...

For me I am moving to a new organization in two weeks and can tell you I am not going to use Atlassian Tools for the new project (I am the team lead)...

And yes we will be assimilated... LOL

Don't forget Liron has a tough job to do and most likely is not making these decisions so I am impressed with her professionalism in the face of irate customers.

Regarding the specific page tree issue (it not being available in the overview page), I beg to differ that "Atlassian will not fix this until there is a demonstrable loss of revenue". Although revenue is obviously what drives most companies, it is not the only driver here I assure you.

One must remember that people use Confluence for a variety of use cases, many of which do not include needing the page tree when looking at the overview page (especially considering the page tree exists on ALL other page views, and in its own tab 'Pages', and is available as a macro configurable to go on any page, including overview if you wish).

Also , we are indeed implementing some improvements in the coming 2 weeks that will ease this pain, I assure you this. This is why we have delayed the dates around making the new experience the default one. As I mentioned in previous posts, I will confirm what we are shipping very soon.

In the near future after that, there are initiatives in place to try and cater for even more use cases of Confluence. This, like always, will involve user research and interviews, and I urge anyone on this thread to let us know if you want to participate in such research in the future. This is how we always build new things (including this new experience) and we would love to hear about the exact context of your sites/spaces in order to learn how Confluence can best serve your specific use case.

So, bottom line is, Atlassian is not turning its back on its users, on the contrary, we have made this design shift based on research and user studies (as we always do) - however we do realise this particular issue is painful for some customers - which is why we will continue to improve on this in the coming future. We are not dropping it, the page tree is still core to Confluence and we need to balance this together with a clean productive user interface - which we will.

Thanks again for the recognition of our work - it means a lot especially in threads such as these.

I'd be very interested in taking part in future research. Like many others I'm sure, tool choice is out of my hands and I have been told that I must use Confluence regardless of whether it's the right tool for us. It's quite apparent that it's not—based on the fact that I continually find that I simply can't do what I need to even before this current change—but it was just about usable with as much customization as I can possibly do. Now it's not...

So to be part of something that might shape the future of the product would be a really positive step.

@Martin Sauter and @Helen Griffith: Check below the same page in "old" and "new" experience. (I had to shrink new page to show all the extra spaces - have added arrows to highlight.) Old experience is compact - new one too sparse!

The old UI enabled me to change the colour of the navigation bar across the top of the space. While it was only a tiny bit of customization, it meant I could see quite quickly whether I was in the right space or not. Now all my spaces look the same at a glance. If I go to Look and Feel -- Themes, I have no 'themes' to choose. It seems that I have to install an add-on from the Marketplace. The only applicable add-on (RefinedSpaces for Confluence Cloud) gets really bad reviews, nor is it free. At this point, I don't want to pay another penny (cent!) for the tool.

All I've been able to keep is my customized colored headings. I used to add a picture in the navigation bar, lost too...

For your answer, I did receive this mail from Liron. Didn't you ?

Space colors and the new ConfluenceHi Bruno,My name's Liron, and I'm a product manager on the Confluence team.You may have heard we're rolling out a shiny new version of Confluence, and there are some big visual changes. As part of the process, I'm writing to let you know that we've decided to remove the ability to set a color scheme for each space. Our analytics show that one or more of the spaces on your site are using a custom color scheme.We're removing custom color schemes for spaces to provide a consistent experience for Confluence users, where the colors of text, links, headings, and navigation items don't negatively affect readability or accessibility. You can still have an avatar for each space, and brand your Confluence site by adding a logo, title, and color for the global sidebar. To provide an easy transition, we'll automatically migrate existing logos and header colors (if you have them) to the new sidebar for you.

Rather than constraining configurability and functional extensibility, Atlassian should be enhancingconfigurability, enabling site administrator/developers to totally customize the look, layout and what functionality is presented on different sites, spaces and pages in Confluence (and JIRA, for that matter).

Yes it should come 'out of the box' with one (or more) slick, fully functional UI look, layout, color scheme, and presented functionality that a significant portion of the customer base will use with few changes.

But, the same way that we use many custom page templates with page layouts and interacting sets of macros, the entire site and individual spaces should be fully configurable. Some customer teams may then create radically reconfigured solutions for entirely new use cases which could benefit you when shared with the community.

Totally agree with Helen - sometimes you want spaces to be instantly recognizable, not 'all the same for consistency'.

IFF you've implemented with a clean separation of responsibilities architecture (model-view-controller...) you should end up with a toolkit of functionality that the Atlassian devs use to configure the 'default' site - just expose that to the user admins.

Two of the best things about Confluence have been the macro extensibility and the REST API. Why not extend that to full site configurability?

I believe both "consistency" and "configurability" should be within reason. Both should be kept simple. While I will vote for allowing different colours for spaces as a SIMPLE configurability option (even if it compromises "consistency", if you will) - but for nothing fancier than that. Similarly, content is the key artifact in Confluence, so I agree with Atlassian that configurability should be limited.

(I have some new users complaining that Confluence editor is not as rich as Word! Of course, I tell them. It is there for collaboratively creating content - not for creating industrial strength webpages and documents.)

The thing is, Confluence is now so feature- and capability-rich that it spans the gamut from being used in the original spirit of wiki-wiki, with the focus on simple collaboration through basically formatted text and image content, all the way up to enterprise documentation and integration with other tools.

It has transcended wiki-wiki and is getting closer to being usable as a fully collaborative hypermedia knowledge capture and creation space.

This is something some of us have been envisioning for years - if it can be bent (configured...) to our evil will (cue maniacal laughter...). With page content serving as input front ends or live outputs from other tools, using labels/page properties/reports to auto-index content, using Comala Workflows for traceable CM of content, etc., the potential utility is massive.

Something like Sharepoint or other 'content managers' are not even comparable because they are still totally mired in the "dead tree" document paradigm of managing files, not actual hypermedia content. Old school notions of "documents" need to be replaced by versioned slices through versioned atomic elements of the hypermedia space... and those nodes may themselves be portals into other spaces or functionality or actually reflect executable processes.

Having UI configurability available helps enables this: site and space layout, where the menu elements are, how they look (icon, font, size, color, default pop-out state) and which of the items available on that menu element are displayed (icon, font, color, order, spacing, etc) should be configurable, as should be the default page layout, fonts, etc.

Perhaps I'm asking for too much...

But... 20 years ago I was fully documenting and executing GN&C design and validation processes in an early hypermedia environment.

Brian, what we've done is made a copy of the homepage (when the Overview section is selected), turning that into a Page. We put that at the top of the page tree and direct people to that. Doing so allows the page tree to be displayed in the sidebar. Here's what it looks like https://luxion.atlassian.net/wiki/x/u2glB

I think this thread shows the lack of Atlassian listening to their customers. Moving our documentation to Cloud, I was assured more customization would be coming. With the new design, the opposite happened, our customers are confused, and we're left with finding workarounds. (Moving to Server is NOT an option.) And now we're paying more with the new licensing. Which leaves us with looking at other options for our documentation.

We need sidebar/page tree options back to at least what they were before.

We need options for initial sidebar display state for a space.

We need options for what to display and what not to display on space/pages.

The "new experience" just doesn't cease to surprise one with instances of complete lack of UX basics! Now, I see the icon of the space that I work in. WhenI hover over it, it shows name of the space. Great so far. But when I click on it - expecting to get to the space overview page, it pops up a menu of "Recent spaces"! And it doesn't stop there. The "Recent Spaces" DOES NOT SHOW the space that I have been working in exclusively all the time! :(

POSTSCRIPT: As I think more, however non-intuitive this behavior appears to me, it sure is a "design feature". I.e. the space icon shows the space I am in, and when I click on it, it shows me recent spaces that I may choose to go to. Oh well.

Above, LIron said "There are many many use cases of it disturbing and taking focus away from the overview page, for some types of spaces."

I'm curious about these use cases and types of spaces. I have always thought confluence was a documentation / support / wiki application. What else do people use it for. I'm clearing not very imaginative, because I can't think of any use that requires a "home" page that needs such total focus that navigation becomes an unnecessary distraction.

"many many" - I don't believe it for a second. Of all the examples we looked at before deciding to go with Confluence, all were used as manual/documentation. None were using Blog and Tutorial. First thing seen was the page tree.

Been continuing to follow this discussion, even though I was/am/will-continue-to-be fed up with Atlassian and their approach to development. I'm also frustrated because I can read the signs and they aren't good.

Still, I have a question: Am I the only one who is truly astonished by what looks to me like Atlassian's cluelessness about what their user base actually does with this tool? More specifically: Are they actually clueless, or is this crappy 'new experience' the result of careful market surveys, and not just of developer/marketer group-think?

The alternative of course is that in both cases where I was contracting for (large!) organisations using Confluence I got what amounts to an unrepresentative sample, and that what they're doing now is actually for the best of Atlassian's business, even though it is annoying to those here expressing their opinion and who obviously are less than pleased with the changes and the company's attitude. Maybe the uproar here is not representative of the user base as a whole, and we're just hearing from those of us who do have reasons to object to the treatment we're getting.

If this is the case, then Atlassian are almost certainly going to continue with their development-behavior as they have in this last 'new experience'...

You make a valid point that we are a self-selecting group of complainers - and the people who are happy with the new version are unlikely to show up in this discussion.

However, I have been using Confluence for a few years now in various organisations - and find it unlikely that their current direction - (de-emphasis on page tree, emphasis on blogs etc) is the majority use case for the platform.

Thanks for that, Brian. Truth is, I have no idea what the overall user-base picture is. Just thought I'd bring this up. As I said, my own sample size is small, and it's always iffy to make broad inferences from small numbers (a.k.a. 'faulty generalization').

And, BTW, I don't consider us 'complainers', though self-selected we are! 'Critics' sounds so much better. 'Defenders Of User Rights' sounds even better (alas, that makes us into the 'DOUR' ones). Also, methinks Atlassian has far less flattering attributes for us when they talk among themselves, even though these would of course never make this forum. Would love to be a fly on the wall there. lol

I presume "no author limit" means you can get as many author licenses as you want.

Ask them for the full price list, there are various mix-and-match options. I'm the only writer here so the plan that works for me is the Business version, which allows unlimited reviewers.

Yikes, there's a quote from me at the top of the pricing page. I did give them permission but I didn't expect it to be quite that prominent.

We're still using Confluence Cloud for internal stuff like specs and status reports and I still like it better than other wikis. The new UI is less efficient but for those relatively simple tasks it hasn't caused any big problems yet.

True, Confluence does seem better used for internal documentation purposes at this point, especially with Jira alongside. I think what most of us are after is a way to hide all the wiki bits from external users - just show the page tree and page!

If you move your customer-facing docs to a Confluence Server instance, you could use Scroll Viewport to publish the content to a web server any way you like, or if you don't care about publishing changes in real time, you could use Scroll HTML Exporter.

Hi @Robert Lauriston - user names were removed from page history a little while ago as part of the introduction of collaborative editing to Confluence Cloud.

When multiple users edit a page and these changes are published as a version, all according avatars are displayed in the 'changed by' column. The removal of names was implemented to allow for additional display space for multiple avatars. We do encourage users to upload a profile pic so that they can be identified visually on such a page.

On a related topic, I've requested for the ability to turn off/on the Contributors column on the "Pages" page given a row of avatars means nothing to our users who just want to get to a page our of product user guide.

Hi @Robert Lauriston and @Martin Sauter - the sticky toolbar is functioning on Firefox on OS X. It'll appear if you do one upward scroll on a page, and should stay there allowing you to access the page action buttons.

So, I must have gotten 'lucky' and my space didn't switch over to the new POS interface until today. I'm really lost. Sometimes the page tree will show up in the left column. Sometimes it doesn't. I don't know if this is because they just transitioned me and it's a bug or temporary, but regardless I assume the page tree is going to disappear permanently at some point.

So, despite all the comments and what I assumed was universal disapproval, Confluence has disregarded all of us?

- search is moved and is worse

- page tree is gone or mostly gone when you visit a space

Has anyone made an idiots guide for navigating this new mess / improving it for users that want the page tree to be persistent so they know where they are? And in this context I'm referring to myself as the idiot, but it wouldn't hurt for the UX designers to eat some humble pie and figure out how to make users happy either.

@david metzler I'd have written a idiots guide if I'd sussed it out by now but it still confuses me (and we've been on the new UI for over a month!). But from what I've found, the Page Tree appears when you are actually on a "page" as opposed to the landing page of your space(s) or the Overview page. Sounds logical but yet it still doesn't seem intuitive to me when I'm using Confluence.

You'll get used to this weird navigation, sort of. Or you could end up like me and just keep clicking until you get to the Page Tree. We have multiple spaces so this becomes even more confusing.

I mentioned this above, but what we've done is made a copy of the top level page (what you select as Home Page in Space Details, which is the page displayed when you click Overview). We put that copy at the top of the page tree and direct people to that. Doing so shows the page tree in the sidebar immediately.

We then hide the Overview page in the sidebar.

Speaking of... This is (at least) one update they've made - you can now hide sections in the sidebar. Click the pencil icon in the lower right of the sidebar. Select the '+' or 'x' icon to show or hide a section.

It may be easier to explain with the links. Here is the link to see the heirarchy (absolutely crazy that this can be viewed publically, even without edit capability, and without any way to restrict viewing it - another issue for another time. arrrrrrrgh).

You can see that 'KeyShot 7 Manual' and 'KeyShot 7 Online Manual' are the same - 'KeyShot 7 Manual' is set as the Home Page (under the Space Tools, Overview options - this Home Page is what displays when someone clicks Overview in the side bar), and KeyShot 7 Online Manual is the copy of that page.

BUT, we link people to the 'KeyShot 7 Online Manual' page so, since it's a page in the page tree, the rest of the page tree is visible in the sidebar.

Today, my Confluence Cloud instance was switched to the new UI. I cannot express how frustrated I am.

For months I've tried to help Atlassian to see and eliminiate the massive usability problems of the new UI. In the beginning, they simply ignored me. Then, when discussions like this one gained momentum, they began to reply, and it sounded like an honest intention to change the product for the better. Now that I see the result I have to say: This was just PR talk – the big issues are still present.

It could have been so easy: Why not leave the users with the possibility to choose themselves between the old and the new UI? Why not convincing instead of forcing us?

Instead Atlassian chose to ignore the user feedbacks like the ones in this discussion. Atlassian: Are you aware the we are your paying customers? Are you aware how many applications of your product you are breaking just for a new shiny design? Are you aware that many of us are experienced professionals and have reasons for complaining?

They do however keep asking for feedback which I ignore now, because Atlassian plainly haven't integrated much if any of this thread into what I'm forced to look at in Confluence now. It's an office wide source of confusion.

But please - do pop up another feedback box. One day I'll forget and the illusion they listen may be some comfort. :)

@Brendan Andrews if you're talking about the community pop-up, that's specifically asking for feedback on the community itself, and we are responding to that. I know it doesn't help with the Confluence Cloud frustration but just wanted to clarify.

Change management is a foundation of good project management, and for Atlassian to mess this up, is surprising.

Please keep looking at reinstating the simple page tree structure - my users are starting to request alternate solutions like Microsoft's platform which offers a number of additional capabilities that will make the sales pitch against my chosen platform (Atlassian) so much easier.

Hi @Abhay Patil - thank you for raising this, and I'm sorry for the disruption that this issue has had on you and other impacted Confluence customers. We're looking into this now, and hope to have it resolved shortly.

We have the same problem here with the missing page tree in the default side bar:

Once you have clicked on «Pages» in a specific space this is the default next time you open that space. But then the space home page is not visible anymore and you have to click again to bring it back.

So we see either the home page with no direct access to one child side or we see the page overview but not the home page without further clicks.

The workaround we've found is to make a copy of the 'Home page', put it at the top of the page tree and link people to this page. This way they see the Home page and the child pages in the page tree. Like so: https://luxion.atlassian.net/wiki/x/u2glB

We then hide the 'Overview' link in the sidebar. 'Pages' is still visible above the child pages and the link to the 'Overview' page is still accessible from the breadcrumbs, but we've added a 'Children Display' macro on the 'Overview' page to display direct links to the child pages and avoid having to go to 'Pages'. It's the most we've been able to do to prevent people from getting lost until Atlassian improves the options and customization.